Along the Afghanistan border, a CIA agent meets secretly with a distraught Arab girl. She passes him a coded message before killing herself. But before the message can be deciphered, the world spins toward war: Within hours, the president of Pakistan is assassinated, and the country's nuclear warheads go missing. Al Qaeda streams into northern Pakistan. Israel puts her combat forces on hair-trigger alert.
CIA paramilitary agent Peter Zembeic is given the impossible task of finding and destroying the missing warheads. Working with his best friend, a B-2 pilot, they develop a desperate plan to save the world from the threat of nuclear terror.
From Publishers Weekly
Stewart's experience as a fighter pilot comes into play in vivid flying scenes featuring the beautiful but tough-as-nails USAF Capt. Tai Lei, but the scope of his ambitious fourth thriller is much larger. The war in question begins with the murder of Pakistan's president and the theft of a cache of American nuclear warheads. The president and his brain trust respond while CIA paramilitary agent Peter Zembeic engages in a complicated search for the stolen warheads, even traveling through Afghanistan and later Tajikistan on horseback. In Stewart's hands, many of the novel's surprising details feel entirely authentic. The complex plot has al-Qaeda's fingerprints on it and, engineered by a character identified as the Great One, targets two dozen world cities for destruction. Along the way, the story spins through more than 20 locations, including Qatar, Oman, France, Syria and Kyrgyzstan. Predictably, the world is brought to the brink of destruction. But Stewart is impressively skilled at presenting the entire tapestry of his warβthe many threads of the terrorist, allied and American forcesβand should hold his readers' interest. (Oct.)
Copyright Β© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Red-hot intrigue and combat action from a talented young writer."
--Stephen Coonts
"The Fourth War is a masterpiece, one that sets new techno-thriller standards. Chris Stewart's literary torque wrench cranks up the tension to an unbearable point in this stark tale of the war on terror. The Fourth War is more than a page turner, it's a mind blower as he tosses twists, turns and surprises on every page. Bound to be a movie!" --Walter Boyne
For Chris Stewart's earlier books:
"Better than Tom Clancy." --Douglas Preston
"A splendid thriller. The aerial action scenes are outstanding." --W. E. B. Griffin
"Full throttle...laced with intrigue." --Eric Harry, author of Arc Light